Jack Zink, 61, a South Florida theater critic and arts writer for almost 40 years, died August 18, 2008. He had been diagnosed with cancer in the fall but remained at work at the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale into July.
South Florida theater critics routinely review productions from Miami to West Palm Beach, and Zink covered the July opening of Palm Beach Dramaworks' staging of Souvenir, the 2005 comedy with music based, as Zink noted, "on the true life of a woman who murdered music every time she sang, and did it often."
He spent almost all his career at the Fort Lauderdale papers, the Sun-Sentinel and Fort Lauderdale News, with brief, early stints at South Florida's other two metros, the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach.
He was South Florida correspondent for Variety and Daily Variety for three decades and contributed to Playbill, as well, but his influence went beyond bylines. Zink led the endowment campaign for the Foundation for the American Theater Critics Association, which supports workshops for young critics and gives annual new-play awards. In the 1970s, he helped create the Carbonell Awards (named for the award's sculptor). The Carbonells acknowledge South Florida theatrical talent, and since 1978, the annual awards ceremony has funded college and university scholarships for students of the visual and performing arts. Zink was the first person to twice receive the George Abbott Carbonell Award for achievement in the arts.
At a public memorial service at Parker Playhouse in Fort Lauderdale a week after his death, the tall, angular and at times goateed Zink was remembered by friends in the newspaper and theater communities as a man who struck an "elegant" figure but was also "a gearhead" who loved to tinker with and talk motorcycles. A hardworking journalist who would turn out a breaking news story even if it was off his beat, Zink knew his way around numbers as well as plays, classical music and cabaret acts: In addition to his fundraising for the ATCA Foundation, he helped organize the finances of his condo association and church.
He was visibly organized. Said Sun-Sentinel television critic Tom Jicha, who sat near Zink in the newsroom, "He had the neatest desk I've ever seen."
Zink, an Ohio native and journalism graduate of Ohio State University, was a lifelong newspaperman. At 10 years old,he was a newsboy for the Lorain Journal near Lake Erie; he was there from 1957 to 1962. His career as a South Florida arts writer began during his 1969-71 stint at the Miami Herald's Broward County bureau, where he was editor of its lively arts section. In 1971 he became entertainment editor at the Fort Lauderdale News, then theater critic for the Fort Lauderdale News/Sun-Sentinel, 1979-92, leaving to become entertainment editor of the Palm Beach Post & Evening Times in 1983. Two years later he was back at the Fort Lauderdale News/Sun-Sentinel for good as, variously, assistant entertainment editor, theater critic, cultural affairs writer and classical music critic.
Zink is survived by his wife, Cynthia, whom he married in 1991, and her two surviving children, and by his two children by his first wife, Susan, who died in 1983.
